Embodiments of the present disclosure relate generally to social networking and, more specifically, to distribution of content items to users of a social networking system.
Social networks, or social utilities that track and enable connections between members (including people, businesses and other entities), have become prevalent in recent years. In particular, a social networking system allows users to more efficiently communicate information that is relevant to their friends or other connections in the social network. Social networks typically incorporate a system for maintaining connections among users of the social network and links to content that is likely to be relevant to the users. Social networks also collect and maintain information about their users. This information may be static, such as geographic location, employer, job type, age, music preferences, interests, and a variety of other attributes, or it may be dynamic, such as tracking a user's actions within the social network. This information about the users may then be used to target content delivery so that users are more likely to receive content of interest to them.
While social networking systems allow individuals who are social network users to exchange information with each other, they also allow entities to provide information to social networking system users. Examples of entities include businesses, organizations and celebrities. An entity may create a brand page, which is associated with a profile, within the social networking system and post content items to the brand page. The social networking system then communicates the posted content item or a description of the posted content item to social networking system users connected to the brand page. Hence, the brand page allows the entity to act as any other user of the social networking system and disseminate information to other social networking system users.
However, various types of entities have a segmented audience, so different social networking system users may have differing levels of interest in various content items posted to the brand page. For example, users connected to a brand page associated with a sporting goods supplier may have varying degrees of interest in posts on the brand page based on the relevance of posts to different sports. Conventionally, users connected to a brand page are notified of content posted to the brand page without accounting for various users having differing levels of interest in different content posted to the brand page.